So – this will be my first post in this forum… Hello everybody

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This is an interesting topic to start with, I think - and it’s a topic to which I hope I can really add something

... I live in Germany; I want to become a primary school teacher, and my main subject at university is English... I could say a lot about how I got to know Keats’ poems and how I started to love them – but I think I should write this down somewhere else

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What I wanted to say here is that I as well prefer reading books and poems and watching films in their original language (okay, I admit that this only includes German, English, and maybe a little French *lol*). I’d say that I’m often very sceptical about translations (to German) – so much is often lost by translating, especially by translation poems (what, as I think, has been mentioned before)! But just recently I’ve bought a “biographical reading book” about Byron, Shelley and Keats – in German, of course

. The poems it contained were there both in the original and the translated version. And I really had to be careful not to look at the German translation really often just because I might not understand every single word of the original version *lol*! I mean, translations might be helpful in some cases, and some of them are not too bad really – but they’re never as good as the original poem! What I find really... hhmm... sad, for example, is that the great sound of Keats’ poems simply can’t be translated into any other language... My English is far from perfect, and my pronunciation could really be better – but I just love reading the poems aloud (I don’t know if this is crazy *lol*?!). And even if a translation gets the words, the meaning and maybe even the metre and rhythm of a poem right – it’s never (it can never be) comparable to the original work...
Well, that’s all I wanted to write at the moment – I hope one can understand what I wanted to say

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